French-Canadian fur trapper and explorer Louis Jolliet depicts the Great Lakes region as a land of endless forest in his 1674 map, which names Lake Michigan "Lac des Illinois." The history of the Prairie State continues here through an 1897 view of Chicago marking the elevated train network, a plan view of Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park, and a 1974 guide to the panoramas viewable from the newly completed Sears Tower, for decades the tallest building in the world. Beautifully illustrated with more than 50 captioned color reproductions of antique maps, surveys, battle plans, bird's-eye views, and other regional images, this is history with an eye to the land and how we used it, reflecting the culture and sensibilities of the state and its residents through time.